


Butterflies

by Jessa



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex (references), Canon-Typical Self-Harm (Referenced), Complete, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Fake Dating Themes, First Kiss, First Time, Flirting, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Oral Sex, Parabatai Bond, Parabatai Feels, canon-typical violence (mild), coming out themes, jalec secret santa, jss2020, parabatai love, physical and emotional hurt/comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:49:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28081197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessa/pseuds/Jessa
Summary: Jace and Alec have been sent undercover to investigate a spate of disappearances. What they find is unexpected and more than they imagined.This gift was created for the Jalec Secret Santa 2020.
Relationships: Alec Lightwood/Jace Wayland
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27
Collections: Jalec Secret Santa 2020





	1. The Kitchen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pelin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelin/gifts).



> Pelin, this gift is just for you! It was a fun prompt to work with and I hope you will enjoy this <3  
> Happy holidays!!
> 
> Thanks to the exchange mods and to Polarnacht for pre-reading, beta-ing, and helping me canonverse this story xx

Jace wakes up feeling startled from sleep. That’s not unusual. Ever since he and Alec were posted here, to the Ogasawara Islands off the coast of Japan, Jace has woken up on edge every morning. 

There’s been a sudden spike in reports of missing Mundanes in recent weeks and intel from one of Luke’s sources, a Warlock working undercover as a medic in Osaka, suggests demons are somehow involved. Jace and Alec are presently staying at a ryokan on Chichijima. By day they are posing as honeymooning Mundanes; a cover for scoping out suspicious behavior in the area.

By night they are sharing a private bedroom and flirting in the ryokan’s communal bathhouse to maintain the authenticity of their cover. Just in case anyone is watching them, growing suspicious and planning to call them out as Shadowhunters. Although that wouldn’t be so bad. A few more demons to fight would be all, they could handle that. What might be bad is being called out for being something else. Like not exactly the most platonic Parabatai. That’s what they’re really trying to hide.

Jace knows, in the eyes of the Clave, he and Alec don’t always behave as Parabatai should. They flirt. And Jace knows that's enough to be charged with Eros. Jace doesn’t know if he would ever admit to Eros though. Admission is the first sign of guilt. But failing to admit guilt would not be done out of fear for himself, Jace is not a coward. Jace Wayland is the best Shadowhunter of his generation and that alone is why he would only deny a charge of Eros out of fear for the best Parabatai: Alec. 

What would happen to Alec if Jace admitted to the Clave that he flirts with his Parabatai? And what would happen if he also admitted that he knows Alec likes it that he does that? Is there really a Parabatai Curse? What does it actually do? Does it force Parabatai apart? And if there’s not a curse, if that’s nothing but an empty threat, would it therefore be the Clave who’d force them apart? Jace doesn’t think he could live like that: forced apart from Alec. 

But wary by nature, it has certainly not gone unnoticed to Jace that even Alec has been relaxing a whole lot more than usual here off the coast of Japan about whether or not a touch he gives Jace goes on for too long or a look he throws his way is too suggestive. Here, off the coast of Japan, Alec’s been flirting back. Barely able to contain his glee at playing husbands with Jace; even before they'd left New York, as they'd packed their gear and weapons into glamoured luggage, Jace had needed to give him several stern nudges through their bond to remind him that the mission didn’t start until they got to JFK.

But once they’d got everything safely through Mundane Customs and were seated on the plane, Alec’s hand had cupped his Parabatai’s knee for nearly the whole of the fourteen-hour flight from New York to Tokyo. And Jace hadn’t given him any nudges then. By then, they’d been officially on mission.

In truth though, as much as he’s enjoying it here, Jace is a whole lot suspicious. He suspects that there is another, more pressing reason why they’ve been sent away together for a time. There are honestly plenty of other American Shadowhunters around to select from, for a relatively minor investigation located on the other side of the Mundane World, and never even mind the number of Japanese ones. 

Why would the Clave choose for Jace and Alec to go this far away now, and to go here alone? And yet, it still seems like an awfully elaborate set-up for catching them out. And Maryse can be brutal but Jace knows real sadists; and as brutal as she is, Maryse has still never struck him as one who would waste time engaging in lengthy punitive games. She’d just come right out with the accusations, wouldn’t she? Or, on the very slim chance she is actually playing the part of the radical matchmaker, she doesn’t strike Jace as that either.

Isabelle definitely does strike him as that though: as the type to unashamedly set him and Alec up. But not in the way that the Clave or Maryse ever would. In the way that only someone who genuinely loved them and cared about them would. In the way that someone who wanted the best for them would, and not just what was best for their own reputation, image, or family name. In the way that Izzy would. 

So now that Jace comes around to thinking about it acutely again like this, as he lies here on the twin-sized futon in their private little ryokan bedroom - a mattress that’s barely big enough for him and Alec to share each night - he wonders for not the first time if it’s actually Izzy who has somehow managed to arrange all of this. He and Alec received word of this mission via means of an email, after all. Not even in a phone call and certainly not doled out in person by Maryse herself. Their mission had been assigned to them in the form of an e-signed transcript only. Does Maryse even know they’re here? It has played on Jace’s mind since they boarded the plane.

Just as instinct had woken him, it now makes Jace reach for the little gold-hilted dagger he keeps beneath every pillow he sleeps on, no matter where he is, in either the Mundane or Shadow Worlds. He might be on a fake-dating mission with his Parabatai, and he might not yet know exactly why he’s here, or who has really sent him, but Jace does know that he will always sleep everywhere at least just a little bit edgily. Which brings him back to waking up feeling startled.

His fingers move along the sheathed blade and down to find the smooth hilt of the discrete weapon still beneath his pillow. And then another, related instinct makes Jace open his side of the bond to check for Alec’s wellbeing. 

Remorse and sadness flood into Jace from Alec and he lets his fingers slide off the hilt of the dagger, and leave it be for now. He rolls out of bed unarmed; still a little bit groggy from the Umeshu he and Alec shared on the beach last night. This hour is far earlier than one in which Jace likes to typically rise in, but he can’t ignore ill feelings coming from his Parabatai. He’ll always rise for those, no matter the time.

Jace follows the feelings all the way to the ryokan’s communal kitchen. It’s so early at the moment that no-one is in it but Alec, and now Jace too; watching him, semi-dressed and crouched down on his hands and knees, carefully picking up broken pieces of something. 

“What happened?” Jace asks, his eyes moving around the scene, noting the long black spatters across the wooden floor and up the lower thirds of the cupboard doors. “Demon?” Jace hazards a guess because the marks on the floor remind him of ichor and he wonders if perhaps he should have brought his dagger after all. Or better yet his Seraph blade.

Alec sighs. He opens his closed palm to reveal a collection of many little pieces of splintered glass.

Jace kneels down to be there on the floor beside him. Through their bond, he can still feel Alec’s remorse and sadness. He peers at the little collection of broken things in Alec’s hand and at one small piece in particular. It’s curved and a pattern is printed across it. And it’s stained with the same black ichor-looking substance as the floor and the doors of the cupboards. 

But Jace knows now that the mess isn’t ichor. He can smell what it is now he’s down here beside it with Alec. It’s such an Alec smell: coffee. Suddenly, Jace understands. He puts an open palm against Alec’s bare back and rubs between the blades of his shoulders, soothing the feelings in Alec that have woken Jace and brought him all the way out here.

“I’m sorry,” Jace says gently, looking at Alec, who is still looking down at the broken pieces of the coffee gadget he brought with them all the way from New York. “I know how much you liked that thing.”

Alec’s eyes flick up to meet Jace’s and the usual butterflies emerge in Jace’s belly, tickling there in the way that only looks like this from Alec can do. To this day, no one has ever made Jace feel these kinds of nerves - there are different kinds - and yet Alec always does make him feel just these special ones. Jace has been attracted to many people before. He’s thought he’s been in love. He’s certainly told people that he’s been in love with them. He’s slept with several girls and kissed several boys. But none of that ever felt like this.

Jace opens his side of their bond and then he feels Alec do that too. The same nervous butterflies are there in him. Jace leans in and Alec does as well and their foreheads touch as light as the wings of a butterfly. That’s always how Jace pictures it. Like when they land and their wings close. The lightest touch that Jace can imagine. It feels like how that looks. It feels so good. And Jace could almost hum at the pleasure, now he’s feeling it again, even though he’s been startled awake. And even though he can still feel the lingering remorse and sadness in Alec because he broke his favorite coffee thing.

“You know, I never really liked it all that much,” Alec confesses, nuzzling his forehead against Jace’s and then drawing away just enough so that Jace can see that his eyes are starting to turn from big and wide and open to crinkle just a little in their corners with the hint of a smile. “It was kind of a drag to clean it.”

Jace searches deeper inside Alec’s eyes as he goes on. 

“The plunger always came apart so often,” Alec says. “And it was hard to put it all back together. The screws are so tiny and my fingers are too big… I guess I’m more worried about what Simon will say when he finds out I broke the gift he gave me last Christmas.”

Jace snorts. The thought of that Mundane holiday still always amuses him. As well as what so many Mundanes seem to like to do because of it. “I won’t say a thing,” Jace says, putting his hand on his heart in the way he’s seen Simon do. “Promise.” 

Alec starts to smile at that. Jace notices a little speck of coffee on Alec’s cheek. He takes his hand off his heart and he brings his fingertips up to Alec’s face, to gently wipe the speck away with those, and with his thumb. Alec leans into his touch. Jace feels the butterflies again. 

“Hey, you wanna hang out in the village today, maybe?” Jace asks, his thumb still gently brushing its way over Alec’s cheek, even though the coffee is well and truly cleaned away by now. “Speaking of gifts, let me buy you a new one of those from that tea shop we saw yesterday.” He juts his chin at the broken pieces of glass still held carefully in Alec’s hand. “They’ve got ‘em. I’ve seen ‘em in there.”

“Sure,” Alec smiles. And Jace feels himself smile too.


	2. The Beach

Alec is the first to see the small display of coffee plungers in the tea shop. He gives up a soft gasp at the sight of them arranged so neatly on the shelf, and squeezes the hand of his Parabatai in pleasure. He’s had a happy hold of Jace’s hand since they left the ryokan. After helping the Mundane staff there to clean up the rest of the mess in the kitchen, he and Jace ate breakfast, showered, and finally meandered down here to the village. 

Alec had stopped them along the way, every now and again - and usually always at times when people were looking, although sometimes not - to point something out along the seaside path. Wrapping his hands around Jace’s waist while they looked out together at a wave or a rock or a gull. And Alec had seen the butterflies again then too. Flitting around the mouth of a cave. Inaccessible from any path he could spot from where they stood on the low cliffs. 

He’s noticed these butterflies every morning since they arrived here, and each time he sees them they strike him as unusual. But each time the idea they are somehow out of place where he sees them never lasts for long enough in Alec’s mind to get around to voicing this instinct to Jace. And earlier, when Jace had nuzzled his cheek against Alec’s face as a Mundane-looking couple walked by, Alec had forgotten all about their appearance yet again. 

Jace is always doing that to Alec here. He’s always doing that to him in New York too, just in not such an overt way. Alec’s Parabatai is always just completely annihilating the reason why Alec needs to be doing nearly anything else but focusing on Jace. And this is not to say that Jace is attention-seeking. Or that Alec is a bad Shadowhunter. It’s not like that at all. It’s innocuous. At these times, Jace captures Alec with simply an agreeable murmur or a genuine laugh. A little glance. Sometimes a much longer study. 

The very best way, though, is always through the little, literal touches. Ones that Alec can always feel taking all the pragmatic thoughts in his head away and replacing them with everything but. The best gift. To be left with a perfectly antithetic world of longing for what he knows is not pragmatic at all. But for what he nonetheless hopes is possible. One day.

It’s blissful being here, spending days with Jace like this. Where the cold and calculating work of Shadowhunting is blurred with the warmth of pleasure so frequently. Even though it’s all a ruse, Alec knows it. Lying down with Jace each night. Waking up with him each morning. But these, too, are nonetheless gifts. Staring at him across a shared breakfast. Sharing morning showers. They’re only meant to be pretending at all of this. They’re meant to be here demon hunting. Solving a mystery. Being pragmatic. But several times already this morning, Alec has completely forgotten that fact. And it’s still only morning. 

Another time had happened even earlier than when they were still on the seaside path. Back when they were still at the ryokan. Alec had again eyed the large wooden tub in the bathhouse while they’d showered - as well as eyeing Jace, of course - and he’d forgotten all about Shadowhunting. And as though that wasn’t astonishingly good already - escaping again into fantasies of Jace - still there was a better part: feeling his own question about the bath unspoken on Jace’s lips too. 

That little but undeniable glimpse that he would pick up through the bond that maybe Jace felt some of the same things Alec did. A yearning for things that weren’t just to do with what they’d always been told they were made for. That being Parabatai could be more than that. More than what they’d ever been allowed. And then seeing Jace’s eyes hood and sparkle in that way they did, that made Alec’s cheeks feel so warm every time they showered together here, made Alec sense it in the room like he could sense so much else about Jace; that Jace wanted to do things like bathe together too. And that it was only a matter of time before they would. Or that’s what Alec hoped.

But as yet, they’ve always stopped just short of actually asking each other to do a thing as hedonistic as bathe. Each time, one of them will think of something else to do with the other instead that is much more in line with what they are meant to be doing here. With what Parabatai should be doing with each other while away on a mission, even if that mission is to go undercover as Mundane lovers. More in line with their responsibilities, more pragmatic like a shower is. This morning it had been Jace suggesting he re-apply Alec’s Glamour rune.

As far as Alec knows, no-one but them knows that Raziel gave Jace the power to create runes. It’s a secret. And Alec doesn’t know why the archangel did it, Jace has never told him. Alec’s not even sure Jace knows why. But for almost as long as Alec has known Jace, since even before they were Parabatai, he has known of this special thing about Jace that is only ever mentioned in hushed voices between them, and that Alec consequently holds close to his heart because Jace has always asked him to do that with this. To tell no-one. Jace trusts him. And Alec trusts back.

Years ago, one night, Alec’s knuckles had stung so badly from the training he’d pushed his barely-teenaged body to complete on that particular day, he couldn’t sleep. That night was the first night he’d lay on his bed biting back tears from the pain of over-training. It was the first time he’d ever pushed himself so hard that his worn-out body had made him cry. And the first time he’d realized that there were things in him that went well beyond the pragmatic. That his emotions were as powerful as anything he could ever train for, be trained for, or push himself to be the best for.

And the thought of all that had frightened Alec but then suddenly Jace had been there with him. Holding his swollen hands and drawing Iratzes over their backs. Soothing all the pain that Alec felt. And then Jace had drawn another mark too. One Alec had never seen or read about in the study they were made to do as young Shadowhunters. Jace had drawn the Glamour rune. So Maryse wouldn’t ask any questions. About Alec’s behavior. Or Jace’s. And that’s when Alec really knew that Jace was more special to him than anyone he’d met had ever been. That’s when Alec knew that he loved Jace.

Like that secret, and like Jace’s, the Glamour rune was secret too. Nobody else knew about it. Yet within the supply of mission equipment had been nothing they could use to conceal either their runes or weapons while undercover here, nothing apart from clothing; even though the Clave was sending them to another northern summer. 

Alec knew he maybe wasn’t quite as much of a natural cynic as Jace but nonetheless, he couldn’t shake the thought that that was kind of odd. And he knew Jace felt it too. The luggage had been glamoured, so they could get safely through Mundane Customs, but that was as far as the Clave’s attempts to conceal them went. The rest was up to them.

“This way,” Alec says, pulling Jace by the hand towards the shelf in the tea shop. 

The glamoured knife that is strapped to his thigh brushes by the little packages of tea and tea things as he and Jace make their way around the tiny shop, finally make their purchase and then leave. Alec with a blue gift bag in tow when they do. Jace is glamouring their weapons too and even though Alec is well used to maneuvering while equipped with arsenal, to do it here - where the lines between work and play are becoming so blurred - is as strange as why they haven’t, as yet, been more supported here to operate covertly. 

The thought vanishes from Alec’s mind though, much more quickly than it arrived, when Jace curls his fingers through the ones Alec has around the supple silk handles of the gift bag. Wordlessly offering to carry it for him. “Wouldn’t do, really now, would it?” Jace murmurs from very nearby. 

Alec lets the handles slip from his fingers and feels Jace place his lips softly against the helix of his ear as a group of Mundanes goes by them, and shivers of pleasure traverse Alec’s spine. 

“Me making you carry something I bought for you around for the rest of the day?” Jace breathes. “That’s not something husbands do.” 

Alec teases at his own lower lip with his teeth in an effort to contain his smile. “I guess not,” he breathes back, blinking close to vacantly and almost on the cusp of a stupor at Jace, who grins maliciously at him in response and then starts to gently pull him by his other hand, down the street. Away from the tea shop and beachwards. 

“C’mon,” Jace murmurs. But his own eyes are nothing less than sober now, defying the way he’s just completely destabilized Alec again. “We haven’t walked the beach since Saturday, Alec. We should scope it out for a bit. It’s lunch now, it’s busy. People are around and you know what that means.”

Alec doesn’t fight the idea. In the back of his mind, he knows Jace is right. Mundanes are out enjoying the sun, the sand, and the water. Alec can see them flocking down from the village and dispersing around the shoreline. Some swimming, some basking. Several idling haphazardly barefoot over rock pools and stepping between beached drifts of kelp. 

They wander together, still hand in hand, passing the gift bag back and forth, all the way down to the hard wet sand at the water's shifting line. Alec wonders for a moment how nice it would be to remove his boots and socks and let the grey silt they walk on cool the spaces between his sweating toes. 

He opens his mouth to ask Jace that and then, from the corner of his eye, he sees them again. The butterflies. Not in their usual place but he can see their usual place from here, the yawning mouth of the cave. Several Mundanes mill in and out of it; and the butterflies move towards the Mundanes. 

Alec stops, raising his hand and moving it instinctively to softly touch with knuckles only at the shallow between Jace’s pecs, over his black sleeveless Henley. Tapping Jace gently there, in the center of his chest. And Jace stops walking too. 

“What is it?” he asks. Through their bond, Alec senses him finger the hilt of the glamoured Seraph blade at his hip. “See something?”

Alec cocks his chin towards the cliffs that line the distant beach. Maybe just short of a half-mile down it southward. “There,” he murmurs, eyes fixed this time on nothing but the little blue flashes dancing beneath the rays of sun against the deep blacks of rock-face behind them.

“Yeah, Alec. Rocks,” Jace says. “That’s great. Amazing. Okay, let’s go.” Jace starts to take off again, pushing against the hand Alec still has held against his chest. 

Alec firms it and frowns. “Wait.” He turns to look at Jace. Then he turns back to the place where he can still see the shimmering blue kaleidoscope of insects. “Not rocks, Jace. Butterflies... There’s so many, must be hundreds... Can’t you see them too?”


	3. The Cave

Initially, Jace was fairly happy to follow Alec here to the mouth of the cave without complaint. They’re Parabatai, it’s what they do; they trust each other. Most of the time. But Jace feels nothing short of nervous now. Speaking of butterflies, inside his stomach there’s a tangible hellscape of anxiety brewing over what’s up with Alec, and what’s causing him to do this.

The longer they’ve walked for - and the further away they’ve drifted from the village, and the populous parts of Ohmura Beach - the tighter the knot in Jace’s stomach has knit. By now a knobbly horror of worry that began to tangle itself in there when he realized that Alec could see something that Jace just couldn’t, hard as he might have tried to.

And when Jace had realized that - when Alec had first said that he could see butterflies, of all the damn things, and when Jace had also realized that this wasn’t just another benign ploy to flirt again on the beach, of all the other damn things - if they were anywhere but way out here, in the picturesque Japanese landscape on a very nice day, Jace would simply get Alec onto drawing a Vision rune on his neck; and Jace would be a lot closer then to knowing just what the fuck exactly was going on here. And he sure wouldn't be so worried because he wouldn’t have to guess why Alec was following something that Jace couldn’t see. He’d know. 

But neither of them can use a stele on a beach packed with Mundanes, not without applying a Glamour rune first. And for that they’d need another one, to glamour a stele. Jace is only glamouring their runes and weapons, their steles and witchlight stones are just being slipped into their pockets. The whole thing's become a ridiculous cycle, reminiscent of that infuriating Mundane chicken-egg question Simon's always asking at completely random times.

“Okay, stop for a minute.” Jace places a firm hand around Alec’s forearm and squeezes. “We at least need a plan first, Alec. I’m not just goin’ in there blind, following something I can’t even see. D’you know how dangerous that could be? We need a plan.” Jace does a quick scan of the beach behind them. “Or at least give me Vision first, alright? There’s nobody looking now, no-one’ll see you do it but me.” He checks the scene again, just to make absolutely sure. “We’re alone.”

Alec glances over his shoulder to where Jace keeps looking, scouting the vicinity too. “Okay,” he agrees. “Makes sense, I guess.”

Jace shifts his boots on the salt-crusted sand and angles his neck, exposing the skin there to Alec. But his eyes remain on the tracks of prints they’ve just left behind them, all up the beach; Jace is still nervous and he wonders briefly whether glamouring those is itself a wise idea.

When the Vision rune begins to burn his skin faintly, and Jace grits his teeth and narrows his eyes as Alec murmurs, “Nearly done,” his doubts begin to cloud. And when the heat from the burn subsides to a prickly warmth - and Jace feels the familiar pad of Alec’s thumb stroke tenderly along his jaw, soothing Jace above the place where Alec’s just finished drawing - Jace forgets his doubts completely. He looks at Alec and then at the spaces around and above them again. Searching the entrance in the cliff face. Waiting. 

And just when he thinks that it hasn’t worked - just when his stomach starts to weave into a fresh round of worry that somehow this magic is beyond his abilities to deal with - a plume of glittering sapphire blue takes Jace’s breath away. 

“I can see them,” he says very quietly, so as not to alert the insects. But they are alerted and more of them emerge from the mouth of the cave. Jace looks nervously at Alec; he smiles. 

“C’mon,” Alec says, making a move to put his stele away.

“Wait.” Jace reaches for his own and glamours Alec’s. Then he passes both steles to Alec so he can do it too; use the rune Jace taught him to help him, both of them knowing this makes runes far stronger than ones they apply to themselves, or to their own things. They watch the marks glow briefly before they vanish, leaving the objects shimmering faintly; the steles - like their runes and weapons - now visible to their eyes only. “From now on, we are doing that daily too,” Jace states. “Knives out then, yeah? Maybe not enough space inside there for arrows… But keep your bow handy, Alec. I’ve still just got this really weird feeling... But at least... Well, shit’s gettin’ real, at least. Finally.” 

The clean sounds of their knives unsheathing in unison from their thigh holsters signal the cautious entry of Jace and Alec into the dim of the cave. As the darkness surrounds them, Jace swaps his small blade out for his Seraph one. It glows just enough at his touch to illuminate his and Alec’s path ahead: a passage.

“Shit’s gettin’ real?” Over his shoulder, Alec throws him an amused look. “They’re just butterflies, Jace, I don’t think they’re demonic. They won’t hurt you.” He turns back to face front and adds, “And even if they are demonic, well... I won’t let them hurt you.”

About the demonic part, Jace won’t beg to differ, he’ll just do it; Alec’s wrong. At the very least, a bunch of things that only Alec can see, and not Jace too, seem very Downworldly to him; and, most likely, a lure. A swarm of pretty insects may not turn out demonic - although Jace is still not reserving his judgment on that - but who knows what has conjured them and how demonic that thing is. And that’s what worries Jace about all this. To where are they being led? And to what are they being led to? Or to who?

He’s trepidatious again and yet, after several days of nothing but him and Alec getting so caught up in the role play component of this mission that often times now it’s genuinely feeling like the pretense is real and all they’re here for, here they are at last with some evidence of something untoward. Which is mission progress. Nothing much in terms of leads since arriving on Chichijima has borne any fruit so far, and even this beach is one they’ve walked down before, although not as far down as this. Nor have they been inside the cave.

But somehow those factors still make Jace smile. And he opens his side of the bond so that even though Alec can’t see his smile - there’s only breadth enough to walk single-file down the passage - Alec can still feel what those words are doing now to Jace. How happy those words make him: _I won’t let them hurt you._ Even if Jace is still undoubtedly nervous. 

They make a fairly silent headway down the passage for several minutes. The only sounds a soft squeak now and again from the soles of their boots, scuffing against the sandy floor. Alec walks in front of Jace, which Jace always prefers. Usually, that’s because Alec is taller and can look out. Although here - inside a subterrane whose ceiling at times drops down so low in the roof that Alec has to duck his head - it’s more so Jace can keep a sharp eye on his Parabatai. Still mindful that it’s him who first saw the creatures they’re following.

Suddenly, the ceiling drops so low that Jace knows they’ll both have to not just duck but kneel to progress any further. Alec drops the gift bag, and starts to bend his knees, but before he can complete the action instinctively Jace grips him firmly by the elbow, shoring him up. Not allowing him to drop down prone to the floor just yet.

“Wait a minute.” Jace kicks at a bunch of loose rocks on the ground that seem out of place, given there’s been nothing like them under or around their boots up to this point; the walls of the passage are smooth, as though eons of tides have washed them that way. Yet suddenly here are sharp edges and rubble. And a ceiling that’s way too low, way too quickly. 

Jace brings his blade out and holds its luminous edges up to the jagged surfaces of rock around shoulder height. “This hasn’t been like this for long,” he murmurs. “Hey, Alec? Have you got your-”

It takes a moment for the sounds of the explosion to catch up to the force it's created. Jace thinks it's just one blast, a single and sudden surge. A wave of warm air rushing at his body harder than Alec or any demon they’ve yet faced. It floors him as a whoosh of grit and grime coats his mouth and lines his nostrils. Jace scrunches his eyes but there’s already grit in those too. He grips his blade as the air current sprawls him to his back. He feels the unforgiving edges of shale beneath it, and he wonders if he’s cut. But not as much as he wonders if Alec is. 

Jace sputters his name but his ears are ringing and all he can do is hope that he’s made a sound at all, wait for all his senses to return, and for the clouds of dust and sand to clear in the air. Then blue overwhelms him. It sharpens his vision without the need for any rune. And he can feel Alec without needing to open his side of their bond again. 

Alec feels okay and he and Jace are inside a cavern, not a passage anymore. That’s been blown to pieces. Some of the edges Jace can make out vaguely. And he can make out Alec, still in front of him. Down on his hands and knees now, physically appearing a little less affected by whatever has just floored them both. Jace spits out the grime coating his mouth and his eyes catch blue hues again. 

They’re painted in winding patterns over the planes of shale embedded in the floor, between the drifts of sand. They glitter from objects arranged inside little crevices niched in the walls; the ones nearby are trinket-like and the ones in the distance glow like Mundane Christmas lights. A few are hung like ribbons from the ceiling. And above it all, suspended in the air, are more butterflies than there are stars in a sky at its darkest, Jace is sure he could never count them all. There are so many.

A new feeling grips Jace. Right where the nerves still also do. It draws his eye beneath everything. Where, in the center of the room, like a tiny sun - something that’s important and not out of place, as though everything should orbit her and does - a small girl dressed in a blue denim jacket kneels on the floor of the cave. A bright blue polka-dot scarf about her neck. And bows adorning two tight braids that frame the shape of her face.

“Your witchlight handy,” Jace finishes. As he and Alec stare in awe at what has just emerged. At who.

As though in answer, another wall of air sends Jace straight back down to the uneven ground, flat on his back. “H-hey!” he coughs, winded and with his mouth full of sand, grit, and Angel knows what else again. “Oh my g-god,” he continues to sputter, not daring to sit up fully yet but propping himself on an elbow to at least be able to keep his Parabatai within sight. But the second blast has not seemed to touch Alec at all. “Sh-it,” Jace is still wracked by coughing. “Man... I honestly didn’t think I was this bad with kids-”

“Shh,” Alec hisses. 

Jace can feel him open his side of their bond and that were he closer Alec would reach out and squeeze Jace’s forearm now. But they’re too far away from each other for that so Alec just sends it as a feeling, flooding his Parabatai with warmth and reassurance. 

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m okay, Jace… Wait there... Just for a minute, okay?”

“Alec…” Jace watches his Parabatai place the knife he’s had out slowly down to the floor of the cave. He lays it there. And he leaves it.

“You...can see that, right?” Alec says slowly to the small girl in blue. “You can see my knife there? And...the rest of my weapons? Right? And my runes? None of them are glamoured to you at all, are they? Is that why you’re afraid? Because you know what we are... You know what we are, don’t you? And it’s you, isn’t it? It’s you who is afraid of us... Right?” 

The small girl says nothing. Jace’s heart is in his mouth. 

Alec stands up and very slowly unslings his quiver and bow from his back. Then, just as slowly, Alec bends to the ground again, his eyes not leaving the small girl in blue. He places these things on the ground between them too, raising his hands and taking one very large step back. “I’m gonna leave all these things right there, okay? I don’t need them. I’m...we’re...not here to frighten you... Okay?” 

Alec bends again and kneels on the sand so that now he and the small girl in blue kneel opposite each other, in the middle of the cavern, deep inside the cave.

“I’m not a witch,” she says. 

Jace and Alec both stare at her. Jace can hear his heart pounding in his ears. But Alec still has his side of the bond open and through it, Jace can still feel the same steady calm in him. The same steady warmth and reassurance. The same Alec.

“That’s okay,” Alec says very quietly to her. “That’s… What are you?”

“Alec…” The butterflies are moving. Jace watches countless wings descend in a blue veil down from the ceiling. And then several begin to flutter around Alec’s upper body, some of them landing lightly in his hair. 

“You’re pretty,” says the small girl in blue.

“Thank you,” Alec answers. “You’re pretty as well… Are you a Warlock?”

This time, the wall of air knocks Alec to the ground too. And this time, when the plumes clear, and when Jace has vision on his Parabatai again, everything blue in the cavern is gone, including the small girl in blue.


	4. The Bathhouse

Alec’s mouth is still full of grit. He can feel sand in just about everything, including things he didn’t know it was possible to get sand in. He runs his fingers through his hair and shakes out another cloud of dust, deciding that if he’s in this much discomfort now then Jace must be in even more; Jace had borne the full brunt of at least one of those blasts they’d felt inside the cave. Alec had a theory about why.

“You should’ve just apologized, Jace.” Alec peels off his dirty t-shirt. Jace does the same with his Henley. “It was a misunderstanding. She was only a little kid.”

Alec loosely folds the t-shirt. Silently, Jace balls up the Henley and they both throw their garments into a dry corner of the ryokan’s communal bathhouse. They don’t usually shower twice in a day but they were both so filthy after the Warlock girl disappeared, they hadn’t even talked about it first; they’d both just come straight back here, to the closest thing they had to a base. Still coming to grips with what happened on Ohmura Beach. As well as what to do about it now.

Alec unzips and starts to pull off his dark combat pants and boots while he watches Jace do the same. Once they’re both bare, they step towards the line of shower-heads. Jace starts a flow of water from one of them.

“Only a little kid?” Jace gives him a look. “Alec, you are way too trusting,” he says, directing the stream of water over his own thigh while adjusting the mixer tap with his free hand to set a temperature. 

Alec watches the skin beneath the flow of water turn slowly pink as the water warms and so does Jace, the blush spreading from his thigh, up towards his hip, and around to the slight dimple in the muscle of his ass. 

“How do you even know she’s a kid?” Jace asks. “Warlock’s can glamour too. And that was a full-grown power, not something a tiny kid-Warlock should be able to do. But you just went and laid down weapons? Man… Shit I was worried when you did that, Alec. Do you actually know that? Turn around, I’ll wash you.”

Alec turns and tips his head back when Jace starts with his hair, closing his eyes as the warm water slowly lubricates his face and drips from the lobes of his ears to the planes of his shoulders. He sighs audibly as the needles of hot water drill pleasurably against the base of his neck when Jace moves the shower-head there. He breathes through his nose when Jace changes to slowly moving the stream back and forth across his shoulder blades now, feeling the waves wash down between the crack of his ass as run-off spills down the backs of his thighs and calves. 

The skin across the front of his body pinches in the comparatively cool air of the bathhouse. He wants to lean back into the spray or to press his back to Jace’s front, but the cold air before him makes his shoulders hunch inward, seeking warmth, and pulling the rest of his body forward too. He feels a broad hand curve gently around his hip and then it begins to move higher, coming to rest against his sternum, and anchoring Alec in closer to Jace, and the sources of warmth. Alec can’t contain another soft sigh.

“Lean back,” Jace murmurs from behind him. “Let me do your front. Then you can do me.”

The hand above his navel moves further up his body and firms around his right pec. Alec leans back and leans into Jace as he directs the warm water across his chest, holding the shower-head again very close to his body so that needles thrum against the sensitive skin around his nipples, sending frissons through him and pleasant thrills down to his cock.

“Okay,” Alec sighs for the third time. Because this is always the point where he knows they can safely arrive at, but to go beyond this would probably not be safe at all. And he never stops Jace. But Alec always does stop himself. “Swap now.”

“I dunno... You’re pretty dirty, Alec,” Jace says. 

Alec can hear the smile in his voice and so Alec smiles too. He reaches up for the shower-head that Jace is passing to him. Jace’s other hand is still curved around his pec, supporting him. 

Alec’s hand lingers over the back of Jace’s so that together they hold the shower-head now; the water still runs just above his left pec, the needles still beating a very pleasant rhythm over his heart. He can hear the soft hiss of the spray and the trickle of thin rivulets running off their lower legs and falling to the slightly textured stone floor of the bathhouse. They make a very lazy path towards the drains set equidistant in the bathhouse floor. 

Alec’s eyes open by just a crack. Through the steam their shower has made in the room, a deep pool of flat, still water reflects diffused sunlight entering through a translucent window. The only source of light in the room. A single drop of water lets go of a grip it’s had on the faucet of the large wooden bath beneath the window. Ripples slowly emanate across the dark surface of the water inside the tub. Alec opens his mouth.

“Hey… Jace?”

“Mm?” His head has come to rest against Alec’s Deflect rune. His cheek shifts a little against Alec’s shoulder. 

“Are you falling asleep?” Alec asks.

Jace chuckles and the flow of water shifts. “No,” he says. “I was just warming up against you, Parabatai. Because it’s supposed to be my turn and you’re hogging all the water. I think I got sort of clean though. But you know what?” Jace lifts his head from Alec’s shoulder and the warmth of the water is suddenly gone from against his chest. Jace directs it straight into his own open mouth, closing his eyes and turning his face to let it wash the orifice clean. Then the spray is back against Alec’s chest. Jace turns his head, spits out the fresh water, and says, “I reckon I’m gonna be bruised tomorrow. You know what would be really good now?”

Alec can think of a few things. But all he says is, “What?”

Jace flicks his wrist several times so the spray coats Alec up and down his stomach, and diffused needles of it softly wash in waves over the sensitive groove between his lower belly and thigh, and Alec feels his cock begin to blush beneath the rhythmic water, just like Jace’s thigh had done when they began this shower.

“A bath,” Jace says, removing the shower-head from Alec’s body and turning it onto his own. “Just to soak in for a little bit, you know? Not gonna lie, Alec. I landed on those bits of shale so many fucking times when we were in that cave. I so bet I’m bruised.” He turns around, presenting Alec with a now very uninterrupted view of his backside while angling the spray of water over his face, ears, and hair. Water drips down Jace’s frontside in ways that make Alec forget he even has knees, let alone that they feel weak. “Alec, am I bruised?”

“By the Angel, Jace,” Alec huffs, suddenly feeling exasperated. “You rib me for being too trusting and then-”

“What?” Jace looks over his shoulder at Alec, flicking his eyes between Alec’s and the limited view of the back of himself he has without the aid of a mirror. “I’m not…doing that, Alec, okay? I’m really asking… Do I have bruises? I feel like I must have a million.”

Alec gazes wistfully down the back of Jace again. There are a series of red marks that pepper the left side of his body, and the shallow between his left hip and the edge of his rib cage is indeed blooming in a large dark bruise that may actually be composed of several all starting to merge into one.

“Yeah.” Alec reaches out to touch his fingers very lightly to where he can see some of the colors spreading out across Jace’s skin. “If you want, I could draw an Iratze,” he suggests. 

“I wanna bathe, Alec.” 

His head is still turned, over his shoulder, and he’s still looking at Alec. But there is no gleam in Jace’s bi-colored eyes. And then Alec knows he’s right. This is not a flirtation. Not the ones they’ve ever done before. Jace’s pupils are wide. And, as Alec looks deeper inside them, he can see that short of anything else he thinks he can recognize by sight alone now in Jace, he just looks tired. Deep in his eyes, there’s a weariness. A pain. And behind that, there is also a worry.

“Okay,” Alec murmurs. “I-I don’t really know what to do though, Jace. Like… Like, somebody else might come in too, right? If they wanted? There’s, like, five showers but there’s only one bath.”

Jace’s face breaks out in a smile that extends to his eyes, even though they’re still tired, pained, and worried. “Yeah, it’s for sharing,” Jace says, shutting off the water with the heel of his palm, collecting their towels, and passing one to Alec. “Like just about everything else here. Perfect for husbands though, no-one’ll twig.” He winks. “So roll that up.” Jace indicates the towel in Alec’s hand as he crosses the bathhouse.

Alec watches Jace and copies the way he rolls his towel up into a tight cylinder. Then, again like Jace, Alec steps up to the edge of the bath and throws his knees over its smooth wooden sides. Jace has already slid himself inside it. Alec’s feet land on a stone bench that Jace has come to rest on, halfway down the water’s level, which stops just above his navel, lapping at the start of his snail trail. 

Jace touches the back of Alec’s calf. “Sit down,” he says. “The stone’s really smooth on your ass. And then you just lay your towel here.” He places it adjacent to the edge of the bath, behind the blades of his shoulders. “And then you just lean back.” Jace closes his eyes. His body slides outwards, along then beyond the edge of the bench, and his torso sinks further below the water’s level. The water laps at his pecs now and Alec watches curls of steam rise from the surface, and color rise in Jace’s skin, as it warms from the temperature of the bath and makes Alec’s view of the forms of his body below it ripple and gleam. “It’s so good,” Jace murmurs, opening his eyes by a crack. “Come in.”

Alec submerges most of his body. He feels gentle knuckles brush against his bicep as Jace coaxes him further down below the water until Alec is stretched out along and beyond the edge of the bench of the bath, just like Jace is. The towel cushioning the base of his skull a little. But mostly it’s the water that supports both him and Jace. He can feel it enter all the places where the grit from the cave was before. And leave him smelling of things he can’t name. Beyond the fact they just smell good.

“Jace?” Alec murmurs. “Were you really that worried?”

Alec’s eyes have been closed as his mind’s been drifting, sifting through what happened in the cave and what's happened since. The delicate sounds of water moving, and the soft lap of it against the part of his upper body not immersed, tell him Jace has shifted from where he was when Alec first lay down in the bath. Alec opens his eyes. Jace’s face is turned towards his. Alec blinks. 

“Always, Parabatai,” he murmurs. 

“Always?” Alec asks, smiling.

“Always,” Jace repeats. “We have to go back there.” 

Alec nods. “Take something blue... Or the bag, it was blue... I think I remember where I dropped it.”

“That’s where they are,” Jace murmurs. “It’s gotta be.” He reaches out and touches the tips of his fingers to Alec’s cheek. “She was right... Sort of.”

Alec shifts in the water, dropping his shoulder, still on his back, but facing Jace a little more now. “Right?” Studying the depths of his eyes again. His throat tightens. “Right about what, Jace?”

Jace whispers something then that Alec knows he’ll never forget. “Alec... You’re beautiful.”

Alec’s chest feels as tight as his throat. It’s so tight he doesn’t know if the words can even escape it. “Jace,” he does manage to say though, “You’re beautiful too.” 

Jace moves closer and Alec feels breathless. So he says it fast in case he really does run out of air and this is the last breath he takes with that last of it. “Do you think it’s real?”

“I dunno,” Jace whispers, sounding as breathless as Alec. 

Alec’s eyes are fixed on his lips. His whole body quivers like he’d never let an arrow but Alec is not a weapon. Here in the warmth and the safety of the bath. And neither is Jace. 

In Alec’s mind, he lays down all of the doubts that he’s ever had that what he felt in his heart wasn’t good enough if that meant that what he did wasn’t perfect; Alec lays down his armor just like he did inside the cave. 

“What can you feel?” Alec breathes, as Jace’s lips grow ever closer. 

And then they touch to Alec’s lips as soft as a pair of wings might close on each other. 

“Butterflies,” Jace murmurs.

And if Alec could answer he would say that’s what he can feel too.

* * *


	5. The Portal

Jace blinks in the silvery night-time light. Beside him is Alec, still in a deep sleep; they’re no longer in the bathhouse but Alec still smells like the oiled wood of the tub and the yuzu-scented water. Jace thinks he himself must smell like these things too, and also a little like their futon again by now. And probably also a lot like Alec. 

He shifts his shoulders carefully, not wanting to wake his Parabatai but needing to. They’ve spent enough time here, they need to get back to the beach. Try to lure the Warlock girl. It still plays on Jace’s mind that they can’t be certain they’re really unknown here and if she can see through their glamours, who else can? 

Jace shifts his body again. Not quite as gently as before. Just enough to make Alec grumble from where he rests belly-down, his chin against Jace’s shoulder and one sleep-heavy arm still slung across his hips.

“Alec, it’s night,” Jace murmurs. “Good cover now. This would be the perfect time to go. We wouldn’t need to glamour. We shouldn’t leave it too long...”

They dress in a silence that’s not uncomfortable, it’s just unusual. While Jace watches Alec snug into his boxer briefs, he thinks about the way the firm curves of his ass had felt when they were cupped in his hands. When Alec pulls on his combat pants and buckles his holster around his thigh, Jace thinks about the way that thigh had been pressed to Jace’s ear as he’d kissed down the length of his Parabatai rune and felt his pubes start to tickle at his chin. And then, as Alec buttons his shirt, Jace thinks about the way Alec’s fingers had pulled so ardently at Jace’s hair when Jace had kissed the head of Alec’s cock and watched for his reaction as he’d opened his mouth around it, and sucked him off for the first time. 

Jace thinks about what Alec had tasted like then. Jace thinks all about what Alec had sounded like too, moaning in a way Jace never knew he could when later on Jace was inside him. Jace already knew what it felt like to fuck but fucking Alec was nothing like that. Although maybe Jace had known that fucking Alec never would be. Fucking Alec would always be different. And the words Alec had whispered in his ear while they fucked, Jace had heard before but they felt different too to hear, and they meant different things to Jace. When he and Alec were pressed that close to each other, and Jace heard those words, he knew he’d always known that; Jace had always known how right sex with Alec would sound and feel and be.

And maybe, as Alec had curled up against him afterward, and Jace had heard those same words whispered in his ear again, maybe Jace had remembered then too that he’d always known Alec could say his name that way and make him feel this right. In a way that made Jace forget the misgivings he was raised on. Just as it was always meant to happen, Jace was meant to forget those doubts. Regardless of how many he’d navigated through in order to get to the place where he could.

They navigate back to the cave in a silence akin to the one in which they dressed. Not at all bad, just different. Alec in front, Jace watching his back in a different way than before. Still watching out, still taking cues, and still for all the same old reasons. But for additional ones now too.

When they enter the cave, and the subterrane’s familiar darkness envelops them, Alec pauses before Jace has hardly gripped the hilt of his Seraph blade for light.

“No activated weapons, remember?” Alec reminds him quietly, touching his hand to Jace’s wrist and turning to look him in the eyes as a white glow emerges through the closed fingers of his other hand, and Alec uncurls them to reveal his witchlight stone. “Even if they’re only to guide us. If she feels threatened, she’ll never come back, Jace. And we’ll have to start over.”

They reach the portion of the freshly collapsed passage. More rock has fallen here since he and Alec left this afternoon. The warning blasts the Warlock girl had sent their way must have weakened the whole cave structure, causing aftershocks; and a space they could crawl through fairly comfortably earlier is now almost caved in all the way. 

Alec pauses afresh, kneeling to search for the gift bag he said he thought he dropped here.

“Maybe she took it with her,” Jace suggests when Alec can’t find it at first. “She vanished all the blue things, remember?”

Jace kneels too and they both search the grounded debris. 

“Doubtful this thing’ll be open for that much longer anyway,” Jace adds sardonically. “Look here.” He touches his fingers to one section of the felled roof and it crumbles at the slightest pressure; solid rock powdering away as though it was nothing but chalk. “I don’t even think we-”

“We’re not going back, Jace.” Alec says it firmly, turning sharply on his knees to face him. In the hand not holding his witchlight stone is the bag, crushed and covered in sand but still distinctly blue. Alec slides it along the floor, through the gap beneath the lowered ceiling, followed by the witchlight. And then he starts to wriggle through the crevice on his belly, following the path he’s just sent the items along.

Jace sighs. “I wasn’t suggesting we chicken out, Alec.” He flattens himself against the uncomfortable floor and starts to squeeze his way through the gap in the fallen rocks too. 

“Yes, you were.” 

Jace has his lips pressed too tightly together by now to answer; attempting, poorly, to avoid the dust that's being stirred up by Alec’s body snaking its way through the collapsed passage ahead of him, and by the disturbance his own drastically inhibited movements make across the gritty ground. Jace snorts as dust enters his nose. He stops to pull up the neck of his Henley, clenching his teeth around it to assist it to stay up and over his face, protecting his airways from the thick air; although he can feel airborne debris starting to collect in the back of his throat and dry his mouth. And each time he inches forward, the shirt gets lower on the bridge of his nose.

When Jace emerges, his frontside now feeling as peppered by bruises as he knows his backside is, Alec is already in the center of the cavern, still on his knees. The bag placed before him like an offering.

“What now?” Jace calls out thickly across the space to Alec. His mouth is still coated by dust and sand.

Alec pushes the bag away from himself. He shuffles back on his knees. “We apologize.” He looks up at where once there were butterflies but now there is nothing but the dark grey slate and occasional stalactite. “ _Syngnōmēn ékhe_.” Alec speaks a language Jace hasn’t heard in years. They both listen to the syllables echo around the cavern. And when they start to fade, Alec turns again to face Jace, looking at him soberly. “You need to say it too.”

Jace frowns and tries to lubricate his mouth. “Say what now?”

Alec sighs. “What we talked about in the shower, Jace,” he murmurs. “Say sorry to her.”

Jace huffs. “Alec, I already explained all this. I’m not apologizing for something I didn’t do. Saying sorry is the second sign of-”

“Please just say it, Jace? I know that alright? But it’s not about that. Do you wanna find these people or not? If we don’t get her here, then we may never find them. We’re here to do a job. And she’s the only one who can stop this but maybe we need to help her start it. We can help her, Jace... _You_ can help her-”

Jace rolls his eyes. Alec looks as beautiful as ever. And as vulnerable; his eyes are so wide and earnest. And his words are so infuriatingly _good_ but to continue to argue the merits of why Jace should stand down, and not her, is maybe not worth watching those eyes of his go from earnest to sad all over again. And feel, through the bond, what that feels like for Alec, the way this day had started; with Jace feeling edgy and unsettled because deep down Jace knew something had upset his Parabatai. And also, just as deep down, right now Jace knows Alec is right; they are here to do a job.

“Sorry,” Jace says.

Through the bond, he feels Alec give him the sort of nudge Jace was giving before they left New York. “Not like that,” Alec murmurs. “You have nothing to apologize to me for, Jace… Say it in her language. Say it in Chthonian. Then she’ll know it’s meant just for her.”

Jace shifts on his knees. They’re becoming uncomfortable and he considers standing but Alec’s not doing it so Jace doesn’t think he should either. They’re Parabatai, they should be unified. But Jace hasn’t uttered a word of Chthonian in nearly as long as he’s heard it spoken. They used to have to study it, like they used to have to study using runes. This was all starting to feel like some kind of penitence. But again Jace pushes the thought away, reminding himself that now more than ever he trusts Alec. “ _Syngnōmēn ékhe._ ” 

His hair is blown back from his face and his eyes slit as a wave of gritty, sand-filled air passes over him. Behind him, he can hear the last of the gap in the passage close as the sudden gust of current blows the remnant ceiling to the ground. Jace’s heart sinks; now there’s no way out, no going back.

Alec becomes a shimmering blue blur through a portal that emerges between the Parabatai, and through it steps the Warlock girl. The portal disappears as quickly as it arrived and she stands between them now. But she doesn’t face Alec. She doesn’t even turn towards him. This time the Warlock girl faces Jace. 

She takes several steps in his direction and at least a thousand things go through Jace’s head, one is to reach for his Seraph blade. Another is to continue to explain what he tried to begin before; that he hadn’t meant to upset her. He’d simply been asking Alec if he had his witchlight handy. Why didn’t she understand that?

“Y-you’re…” Jace doesn't know what he’s about to say. Only that he should at least say something. Alec nudges him again through their bond and words just seem to come to Jace’s tongue then. Words that start to feel like they come from his heart. Instead of an impulse to prove his worth. “Do you... D’you have a name?”

“Yes,” the Warlock girl answers. “Someone gave me a name.”

“Okay,” Jace says. That’s progress, isn’t it? At least she isn’t trying to blast him off his feet again, maybe this is progress for her too. “That’s good, someone, um… Well, someone gave me a name too. A couple of ‘em actually. I’ve got a couple of names. From a couple of different someones.”

“Why?” the Warlock girl asks. 

Jace blinks. “Huh?”

“Why did someone give you a couple of names?” she asks. “Why do you need more than one?”

There’s grit in his eye. Jace reaches up to scrub it away. It buys him some time to think. “Well,” he says, “You know what? I don’t think they actually quite knew what to call me at first.” He scrubs at his eye again. “Sometimes, I don’t really know what to call me either.”

“What do you call you most of the time then?” she asks. And then she turns to look across at Alec. “What does he call you?”

Jace looks at Alec too. He’s still on his knees in the middle of the cavern. “Well, he calls me _Jace_ ,” Jace says. “So, I call me that too. I guess.”

“My name is Madzie,” Madzie says.

“Madzie,” Jace repeats. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Madzie. That’s Alec, by the way, over there.”

Jace motions to Alec but Madzie doesn’t take her eyes off Jace. “Why are there Shadowhunters here?” she asks him.

Jace flicks his freshly-scrubbed eyes between Madzie and Alec. He feels Alec give him another little nudge but it’s not like before. It’s not a warning. It’s the warmth and reassurance Alec first sent hours ago when they were here the first time. “We were assigned here,” Jace says truthfully, hiding nothing anymore. “Do you think you know why we were assigned here, Madzie?”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” she whispers. “I was just looking for someone.”

Suddenly it’s hard to breathe. Jace reaches for the neck of his Henley, loosening it; it feels so tight around his neck. But it’s not tight at all, it’s loose. And made even looser by the fact he had it pulled up over his face as he crawled through the gap in the tunnel that’s just collapsed, the only way out. The only way in. And hard as he tries Jace can’t fill his lungs as though the air in the cavern is being slowly removed from the sealed space. 

“No way in,” she murmurs.

“Madzie,” he chokes out. “Please...”

He can feel Alec, meters away, struggling for breath now too. Reaching through the bond for Jace, reaching out. As though if he could say his name he would but he can’t because he can’t get the oxygen in to say it with. She’s sucking it all from the room. 

“Madzie,” Jace strains to say, his knees growing weak, his vision tunnelling. But knowing that Alec’s in trouble too suddenly seems to give him one last surely-impossible breath. The last one left in the room. And just enough to make a final plea. “Tell us what you need… Let us help you… We’re not here to hurt you, I swear it by Raziel...”

All of a sudden, there’s air in his lungs again and the tight feeling around his neck is gone. Jace launches forward, heaving for breath. And then he launches himself from his knees and to Alec, who is doing the same, and they meet each other halfway. Jace feels himself being patted down, checked over. Alec’s huge hands gripping his cheeks and holding his jaw. His eyes searching. And then his mouth is against Jace’s mouth and Alec is kissing him, not soft but feverishly this time, until slowly the kisses subside. Jace and Alec part. And they both turn to Madzie.

“Tell us where they are,” Jace appeals again, crouching down to her level. “Are they okay?”

“Yes,” she answers. “I didn’t mean to take them. It just happened… I don't mean to do a lot of things.”

“We believe you.” 

Jace turns to look at Alec who has crouched down now too, beside Jace. Madzie is still meters away. She stands beside the remnants of Alec’s blue gift bag, nervously clasping and unclasping her hands, her eyes wide. And if Jace had to guess, he’d say they were also terrified. 

But not of him or Alec. They're not armed and their sight-lines are lower than hers; she looks down on them from where she stands. And if Jace had to guess about that too, he’d guess she was afraid of herself.

“Madzie,” Alec says, motioning towards the crushed bag, “If you like, you can have that. You like blue things, right? You showed me the butterflies, remember? They were blue, and... Well, I know it’s gotten a little bit wrecked but-” 

“I don’t want things,” Madzie whispers. “They don't help... There’s a lady. I’ve seen her. None of them are her... I just want her.”

Jace looks at Alec. He’s still staring at Madzie and she’s still staring right back.

“You’re searching for a lady?” Alec asks her, his voice as gentle as Jace thinks he might have ever heard it.

“A nurse lady,” Madzie says. “She can make portals, just like me. I watched her on a beach. With someone just like you.”

“Wait a minute,” Jace says. “Izzy?”

Alec’s eyes widen. “And you don’t think-”

“I do think, Alec, that there can’t be that many _nurse ladies_ making portals… A medic’s a fucking nurse."

Jace reaches out and takes Alec’s hands in his own. “Might be a trap, I guess," he adds, rubbing over Alec’s knuckles with his thumbs, wondering who he’s soothing more now. Knowing though the difference would only count in words. Their feelings are connected, like their souls. They always will be. "But, you're right, Alec. We still need to help her... Even if the other person she's seen isn't Izzy... Even if she's seen your mother... We can’t not help her out of fear of Maryse... Or out of fear of the Clave.”

Jace opens his side of the bond and he floods Alec’s side with all of the warmth and reassurance that Alec has always poured into Jace whenever he's felt unsure. The butterflies are back inside his belly and so Jace sends those through too. Alec smiles and Jace squeezes his hands. And then they stand together, ready and unified. Parabatai.

Jace turns to Madzie. “If you can make a portal now,” he says, “Me and Alec can help you get to where you need to go. We know where to go, we just need your help to get you there, okay? But if we help you do this, you need to free them, Madzie, please? The missing Mundanes. The people you’ve accidentally taken, okay? You need to free them when we get there and return them here to Chichijima.”

“Okay,” Madzie says. And for the first time Jace and Alec see her smile.

Then, with one hand, she begins to draw an arc in the air as with the other she summons Alec’s bag. She hands it back to him. 

"I don't know what's in there but it sounds pretty broken," she says, as the portal begins to form and Jace braces for the shockwave of air he strongly suspects is coming. "But maybe the nurse lady knows how to fix it. She's pretty powerful, you know."

"As powerful as you are, I bet," Jace overhears Alec say to Madzie as they watch her portal grow in strength.

Butterflies re-emerge around her, and Jace can still feel the ones inside his belly. Through the bond, he feels them still inside Alec's too. He still has a hold of one of Alec's hands so he squeezes Alec’s fingers. And Alec squeezes Jace’s right back.

Madzie steps towards the portal. Jace and Alec follow her. And nothing they've kept secret's hidden now.

They're ready to face whoever they'll need to on a beach in Osaka together.


End file.
